


tony and peggy's big day out!

by floweryfran



Category: Agent Carter (Marvel Short Film), Agent Carter (TV), Iron Man (Comics), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Agent Carter (TV) Compliant, Agent Carter References, Agent Carter Spoilers, Aunt Peggy Carter, Awesome Jarvis (Iron Man movies), Awesome Peggy Carter, BAMF Edwin Jarvis, BAMF Jarvis (Iron Man movies), BAMF Peggy Carter, Edwin Jarvis and Peggy Carter, Fluff, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Howard Stark's Bad Parenting, Human Jarvis (Iron Man movies), Jarvis (Iron Man movies) is a Good Bro, Kid Tony Stark, POV Peggy Carter, Peggy Carter & Howard Stark Friendship, Peggy Carter is Tony Stark's Godparent, Protective Jarvis (Iron Man movies), Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:21:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22249333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floweryfran/pseuds/floweryfran
Summary: She presses on the communication device in her ear. “Mister Jarvis, do tell me you’re nearby.”His answer is immediate.“I am but four blocks away, Missus Carter. What is it you need? A coffee, perhaps?”“Oh, nothing of the sort,” she says, panting slightly with her rush. The screams of civilians ache in her ears, set her stomach rolling. She tries to find breath, force it into her lungs. Someone slams into her shoulder and she stumbles. Tony grips her hand doubly hard. She grabs him in a smooth motion, an arm beneath his bottom and a hand on his back, and his arms go around her neck impulsively, his nose pressing into the side of her throat. “Perhaps a pickup, if you’re not too busy?”“Why, never for you,”Jarvis says.“What’s happened this time?”“Just a bombing,” says Peggy.“At three in the afternoon?”says Jarvis.“Frankly, how rude.”
Relationships: Edwin Jarvis & Tony Stark, Peggy Carter & Edwin Jarvis, Peggy Carter & Edwin Jarvis & Tony Stark, Tony Stark & Peggy Carter
Comments: 52
Kudos: 402





	tony and peggy's big day out!

The first time Tony Stark proves himself a hero, he is much younger than one might expect. 

They had been having a rather lovely afternoon just the two of them, Peggy having offered to watch the boy for Howard and Maria so that they might have a day off to diffuse some of that terrible, tense anger that has been sitting sentinel upon Howard’s shoulders, dragging him by the lapels towards something so haunted and dark that Peggy dreads to see where it leads him.  _ Quality time for you two alone,  _ Peggy had insisted, _ will undoubtedly do wonders. Just one day. I’ll watch the lad, no problem.  _

Howard and Maria need never know that Tony is- for Peggy’s purposes, at least- really quite an effective prop with which to perform some simple reconnaissance work. 

Her cover is impeccable: a pair of slacks that sit high on her waist and fall wide at her ankles, a knit turtleneck in an unassuming olive green, a pair of heeled loafers. Her makeup is clumsier than usual, her hair more mussed. She’s the perfect image of a harried mother. 

Mister Jarvis is in her ear via a communications device. It’s really quite convenient, the ways in which technology has improved. It’s one of the increasingly few reasons she keeps Stark around even as he grows jaded and bitter. The other reason is in the carriage before her. 

Tony is not yet six years of age but she would assume him a genius of age seventeen by talking to him. He oozes intellect, cleverness, a sharp wit, even as he toddles around in his little rubber-soled shoes. Not only is he smart, but a sweet boy, too, which is something his father surely never achieved for himself. Peggy must have seven or eight crayon drawings hanging in her office from Tony, to go along with the ones from her own children, now grown. Tony is like a last glimpse of a fantastical world hidden in cardboard boxes and the dusty corners of her wardrobe, a wonderful reminder of the life she so deeply loves living with Daniel. 

_ “Have you a visual, Missus Carter?” _ Jarvis asks her. 

“Hmm,” says Peggy. She squints, her purse bouncing off her hip as she walks. “Not yet,” she says. The crowd looks fairly normal— New York normal, rather, which is to say terribly strange but in the usual way. Everyone rushing, heads tucked. Scrambling, elbows splayed. No particularly large bags. No suspicious stragglers. “I don’t believe the tip was flawed, but I must say I had hoped our man would be a bit more obvious.” 

_ “You’ll probably spot him if he’s there,” _ says Jarvis. 

“Your unwavering support simply floors me,” Peggy says. “What ever did I do to deserve you.”

_ “You endure the company of Mister Stark,”  _ says Jarvis, and Peggy snorts a laugh. She reaches a crosswalk, looks both ways, and quickly steps down onto it, maneuvering the wheels of the trolley expertly.  _ “How is the young master this afternoon?” _ Jarvis adds in a light tone that Peggy can hear right through. 

“Oh, not again,” she says. Quietly, but fiercely. 

_ “Anthony came to find Anna and I in our quarters this morning,” _ Jarvis says tightly,  _ “with a bruise ringing his right arm and a— well, a welt on his left one that I assume was left by the buckle of a belt.” _

“A belt,” Peggy repeats. She holds a hand over her eyes like a visor so as to see across the street more clearly. Autumn sunlight is still sharp when refracted off glass monoliths such as these. “Did Anthony explain why?”

_ “He had dropped a glass of water at breakfast. It shattered onto the floor. He- needlessly, of course- assured me he apologized many times. He was… quite remorseful. Guilty to the point it seemed— it seemed he felt he deserved it.” _

Peggy inhales. “And if I kidnap the boy, would it really be such a problem? I’ll share custody with you and Missus Jarvis, of course, gladly.”

_ “If only,” _ Jarvis says. 

“In a perfect world,” Peggy says, “we wouldn’t need to steal him. In a perfect world he would’ve been yours and Anna’s to begin with, would never have to deal with this sort of rubbish from Howard.” 

Jarvis is quiet for a moment.  _ “Have you anything else to report, Missus Carter?”  _ he says. 

“That will be all for now, Mister Jarvis,” she says. 

The voice in her ear goes silent. She clenches her teeth, listening to her heels on the pavement and the wheels of the trolley spinning evenly. 

Ah well. It’s not her business, Jarvis and Tony’s relationship. 

(By which she means, of course, that it absolutely is her business. Everything is her business. This in particular is just business for a later date.) 

She refocuses on the job at hand with a deep breath that smells of gasoline and sour excrement. She blows it out and stops under the shade of a store with a name written in a curly golden cursive she can’t imagine decoding. She fumbles with the mouth of her obnoxiously bell-shaped purse, pulling the catch with a fingernail. Inside of it, in a zippered pocket, is a fake packet of cigarettes holding her little Tessina camera. The metal of it is cool against her skin. She pulls the carton out with the camera still inside, fiddles with the lip of the cover to give it a proper range of capture, and begins to shoot surreptitious pictures to examine properly later on, hoping to catch something. That would be— convenient. 

She fiddles around obviously, catching her purse in the crook of her right arm and sticking the other hand inside, swinging the bag as if rustling through it, mumbling to herself under her breath, and, with what looks to be nothing more than a cigarette carton in her right hand, clicking picture after steady picture of the street corner beyond her where it was mentioned in a coded letter there will be a signal of sorts from a KGB bastard they’ve been distantly tailing for weeks now. The letter claims the message would make itself known the following day: Peggy is simply acting with the pragmatism she’s preached her entire life. Better to be prepared and all that. 

Satisfied, she replaces the carton to her purse. She then leans over, before the trolley. She reaches a hand out and brushes some overgrown waves from a sleeping Tony’s eye. He looks peaceful in dreams, like the sweet sort of cherub seen on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In his hands, he clutches one of the newer Bucky Bears, the kind with the camouflage jacket to garner public favor towards the war in Vietnam. It figures that Howard would get one of these for his son rather than handing down the Bear he’s kept since their original run, the one with the mask and tights as if Barnes had been a superhero instead of a poor, heartsick bastard with an attitude problem and a deep love for broken, lost, little things. 

Peggy sniffs. Howard has always been the type to keep things for their monetary value rather than their sentimentality. It is one of the few things about the man that has never changed. 

She rubs a thumb across Tony’s knee and then stands straight again, returning to her post at the handles of the trolley. 

“Mister Jarvis,” she says quietly. She looks around with false confusion painted across her face, as if she’s lost, looking for a store she simply cannot find. “I’ve taken some recon photographs. No promises, but nothing looks at all out of order. I will meet you at our rendezvous point in ten minutes.”

_ “Very good, Missus Carter,” _ says Jarvis. With a click, he disconnects. 

It is about then that the other half of the street explodes in a flurry of brilliant shards of glass and twisted, burning metal. The sidewalk below her bucks, cracking in long, thin strips, and a wave of heat burns at the skin of her face. She leans against the brick building behind her, pulling the carriage closer, turning it away from the blast. The sickly sweet smell of burning flesh aches in her nose, in her forehead, in the back of her throat like bile, and she blinks away the image of a frosted forest in Germany with a group of gun-wielding fools at her back, gnawing on their lips and struggling to stay close to Steve to steal his body’s warmth, to steal protection from behind his shield, to shoot at the stragglers remaining from the Nazi camp they had just blown to smithereens down the hill. 

She sucks in a breath. Remembers the itchy wool of her trousers against her knees, the plastic and foam of the trolley handles clenched in her fists. 

Tony, there, with her. She can’t— she can’t go to aid the injured now. She needs to get him out, first. 

Peggy, though growing grey-streaked and crinkle-eyed, has wits sharper than a sea-slapped edifice, crude carved rock, an unmovable force grinding another. She tells herself this. She moves. “Crikey O’Reilly,” she grinds out, and immediately hunches to undo the latches holding a suddenly awakened Tony into the trolley. “C’mon, Anthony, c’mon. We’ve got to go, love, hurry with me, now.”

“Aunt Peg?” he says, and she watches his lip tremble. 

She lets her knees touch the sidewalk and takes Tony, now standing unsurely, by the shoulders. “We must hurry. We are going to find Mister Jarvis, and you are going to go with him, alright? You’ll be safe in just a moment.”

The way he looks at her. Like she’s all-knowing. “Okay,” he says, and then he takes a deep breath. He straightens himself, stands taller. 

Peggy takes him by the hand and they hurry away from the smoldering fury and hubbub on the corner. 

She presses on the communication device in her ear. “Mister Jarvis, do tell me you’re nearby.”

His answer is immediate.  _ “I am but four blocks away, Missus Carter. What is it you need? A coffee, perhaps?” _

“Oh, nothing of the sort,” she says, panting slightly with her rush. The screams of civilians ache in her ears, set her stomach rolling. She tries to find breath, force it into her lungs. Someone slams into her shoulder and she stumbles. Tony grips her hand doubly hard. She grabs him in a smooth motion, an arm beneath his bottom and a hand on his back, and his arms go around her neck impulsively, his nose pressing into the side of her throat. “Perhaps a pickup, if you’re not too busy?”

_ “Why, never for you,” _ Jarvis says.  _ “What’s happened this time?” _

“Just a bombing,” says Peggy. 

_ “At three in the afternoon?” _ says Jarvis.  _ “Frankly, how rude.” _

“My thoughts exactly,” says Peggy, and she sees the black Beetle round the corner, the sun and the reddish glow of the burning block two streets behind them shining off its face. She lifts a hand from Tony’s back and sticks it high in the air. “There you are,” she says. 

The car swerves with a squeal of the tires, knitting between traffic, getting honked at and hollered towards, and Peggy’s hand wrenches the door open before Jarvis comes to a full stop. “Alright, darling,” she says, putting Tony onto the back bench. “Be good for Mister Jarvis, now.”

“You’re not coming?” Tony asks, wide-eyed. 

“No, not now,” she says. “I need to go help. People got hurt back there.”

“Missus Carter,” Jarvis rebukes quietly. She meets his eye through the rear view mirror. “I believe you should leave this to the EMT’s, for they are more suited to treating field injuries than you.”

Peggy takes a deep breath through her nose, trying to force the simmering heat in her stomach lower, lower. “I may be needed, Mister Jarvis,” she says. 

“You are needed here,” he insists. 

She steals a glance towards Tony, buckled in and staring at her, fear written in every quirk of his toddler lips and wrinkle between his tiny brows. 

She slips onto the bench beside him without speaking a word. She closes the door behind her. Jarvis peels away from the sidewalk and down the street, taking the first possible turn at a great and incredible speed. 

The pager within her purse dings. 

“That must be Daniel,” she says, fast. She unclips the mouth of the bag, digs through it. 

The message says, in Daniel’s voice,  _ come to HQ, urgent, bring your own transport.  _

She says, “bollocks.”

“Mouth,” says Jarvis. 

“Excuse me, Anthony, darling,” she says, and lets a hand fall atop his head. She brushes idly through his curls. “Never repeat that word.”

“Bollocks,” he says, and then grins. Peggy tweaks his nose and he giggles, sweet and mischievous. 

“Mister Jarvis,” says Peggy, “I do believe we’ve just been wrangled into another one of our wild adventures.”

Jarvis is silent for a moment. He wrenches the wheel, turns the car towards the SHIELD headquarters on the Upper East Side. “This time,” he says, meeting her eye pointedly in the mirror once more, “the stakes seem to be awfully higher than usual.”

“Oh, most definitely,” she says, careful to keep the rhythm at which she strokes Tony’s hair steady. “Higher than ever.”

—

“A day early,” she says again to the assembled agents before her. “Are we stupid? Of course he did it a day early. Christ almighty, we’re slacking, aren’t we?” 

Tony is sitting behind her, at her desk, upon the lap of Edwin Jarvis, voraciously reading through an old crime report she told him is part of a fiction book. Jarvis has a somewhat horrified twist to his nose as he reads over Tony’s shoulder. 

Agent Twenty-Two squints at Peggy. “So we’re positive it’s our guy? It couldn’t just be a coincidence?” she says, her bell sleeves swinging as she speaks with her hands. 

“In the same location our man claimed to plan an attack upon tomorrow?” Peggy flicks an eyebrow. “Highly unlikely.”

“Are there any reports on damages or casualties?” says Agent Eight. 

“Not yet,” she says. 

“How bad did it look?” asks Agent Three. 

She meets his eye steadily. “Small blast zone. High heat. Intense reverb. Planted in the sewers.” She pauses. “Bad.” 

There’s a shared moment of silence, the only sounds coming from the whirring of the air conditioner in the window and the rustling of Tony flipping pages. 

“Do we still have that warrant that let us search the sewers last May?” asks Daniel, leaning against the desk at her side. 

“It’s in the top drawer of file cabinet six,” a voice calls from across the room. An intern with enormous glasses and a mousy mane of hair is peering at them. 

Peggy looks at her with her eyebrows raised. 

“I rearranged it last week,” the intern says. “I, uh, know where pretty much everything is.”

“Delightful,” says Peggy. “Would you like to come march through the sewers with the boys, keep them organized?”

The intern blinks. “Uh, what?”

Peggy waits. 

“Oh, you,” the intern breaks off and whispers, “oh my god, she meant it.” She clears her throat and takes a few steps closer, her leather loafers creaking. She stops at the edge of the group. “I would like that very much, Director Carter,” she says. The corners of her lips tremble. 

One of the agents in the back rolls his eyes. Peggy pretends not to see Agent Twenty-Two punch him in the stomach, her white sleeves flowing majestically. 

“That’s settled, then,” says Peggy. She motions towards the leftmost section of the group. “You all: street recon. From Agent Seven over, you’re incognito. For all intents and purposes, you’re civilians today. On the other side of Agent Seven: bring your badges; you’re not undercover.” She gestures to the center. “You all: stay here. Take calls, go through the files, watch the pagers— see if you can connect anything we find about today’s attack with the past attacks.” She gestures to the remaining section. “You all will roam the sewers for clues. Bring your permit. And your galoshes.” They wait for a moment. “That was a dismissal. Sally forth, you lot.”

The group splits and dissipates, whispering amongst themselves. 

Daniel reaches out a finger and lets it brush the back of Peggy’s hand. She looks to him, a weight slipping from her shoulders just meeting his eyes. 

“And where will you be off to, Peg?” he says. 

“I,” she says, “will be exploring the sewers on my own.”

“You think you, alone, can out-do a group like that— of our best, our most acclaimed agents?” Daniel says, grinning, teasing. 

“No,” she says. “I  _ know _ I can.”

—

Jarvis parks the car beside the alley she designates as the drop point. 

“Alright, Anthony, let’s go,” she says. 

“Wait a moment,” says Jarvis. “What the devil did you just say.” 

“Oh, are you suggesting he would be safer alone with you?”

“You know I’ve trained in the martial arts!”

“You know I can kill a man with both hands tied behind my back!”

Jarvis turns fully in his seat to face Peggy. “Missus Carter, I will never question your capabilities as a warrior and a woman. You are terrifying, absolutely.”

“Thank you,” she says. 

“You’re most welcome.” He sniffs. “The crux of the matter is whether it is logical to bring Master Anthony further into a situation that could cost him his life. Should I not bring him to Howard and Maria for the time being?”

They stare at each other for a long moment, hating that idea equally. “I believe,” Peggy says slowly, “that Anthony is less likely to be injured if he comes with me into the sewers than he would be if you bring him to Howard.”

Tony leans over and rests his head on Peggy’s thigh. “I like bein’ with you, Aunt Peg.”

“And you don’t want to stay here with Jarvis?” she asks. 

Tony peers up at Jarvis through his black, feathery eyelashes. “I love Jay, but I never get to see you.” He reaches a hand out towards Jarvis and the man catches it in his own, rubbing the pad of his thumb over the line of Tony’s knuckles. “I wanna go adventuring with you, like Jay tells me in his stories.”

Peggy gives Jarvis a satisfied look. “I can keep a child safe,” she says. 

“I have no doubt that you can,” Jarvis says, as if he has many doubts as to whether she can. 

“I did raise two, and they turned out just fine,” she says, bordering on manic. 

“Yes, well, you had Mister Sousa to tamper you, didn’t you?” Jarvis says. 

Peggy glares. “I will be  _ safe,  _ Mister Jarvis, thank you very  _ kindly.”  _

Jarvis waves his free hand for a second. “I hope you mean that,” he chooses to say. “It is a rare day indeed when Peggy Carter chooses to be safe.”

She rolls her eyes, gives Tony’s little shoulder a gentle shake. “C’mon, lover,” she says. “We’re going to adventure, just like Jarvis has told you.”

Tony looks up at her, soft-cheeked and sweet, and grins a gap-toothed thing that turns her ribs into sauce. 

They gather torches from the trunk, testing out the batteries by shining them off the side mirrors of the Bug and into Jarvis’s eyes. Peggy grabs a backpack stuffed with ropes, a knife, a gun and some bullets, a pager wired to speak through the car’s radio in case her communication device goes out, and some matches. 

She watches Tony give Jarvis a loud kiss on the cheek. Jarvis whispers something in his ear, to which Tony answers, “I promise!”

Peggy takes Tony’s hand, pulls the cover off the manhole, and begins to lower herself down the ladder. Tony follows her easily, citing the similarity of the thing to the ladder of his bunk bed,  _ except bigger and a lot darker.  _ When they reach the ground, Peggy jumps off the ladder with a wet slap. She takes Tony around the waist and lifts him the rest of the way, putting him down gently. She rolls the cuffs of his pants so they keep from getting wet, then does the same to her own. 

She takes a deep breath. 

She takes the torches from the pack one at a time, and hands one to Tony. “Here you are,” she says. “Do you know what our mission is?”

Tony shakes his head, his little fingers glowing pinkish with the light of the torch he holds. 

“We,” Peggy says, straightening her shoulders and grinning a little, raising her voice into something she hopes foretells fun, “are going to walk through here and look for anything strange we can find. Do you know something that would be strange to find in a sewer?”

Tony taps his little fingers against the plastic of the torch. She hears the batteries moving. He frowns as he thinks. “A rocket ship,” he says. “Or a restaurant.”

“Mm,” says Peggy. “Yes, but— um, think smaller, perhaps.”

“A football?” says Tony. “Or— or a coat?”

“Very good, Anthony,” Peggy says. “A coat would be  _ exactly  _ the type of thing we’re searching for. But if there’s anything at all you see, or hear, you tell me, okay? Aunt Peggy is good at her job, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you end up better than me,” she prods him in the middle of his soft belly, “keen as you are.” 

He grins up at her. She feels undeserving of the stars in his eyes. 

He fists a hand in the fabric of her pants, bounces on his little knees, and says, “let’s go! We’ve got stuff to find!”

They walk down tunnel after tunnel, dimly lit and stinking with the odor of filth. Tony knows her work is very important and thus asks her if she got to meet any famous people. He is disappointed to learn she has not, in fact, met John Travolta, but she promises she’ll pass on his best if she ever does. In turn, she asks about the things he likes to build. 

“M’building a really cool robot right now,” Tony says, swinging his free arm as he walks. “His name is Henry and he’s going to be able to follow me around like a puppy, since mamma says I can’t have a dog because it’ll upset father.”

“I think your robot will be even cooler than a dog,” she says, “because you get to make it however you want.”

“Mmhmm,” Tony agrees. 

“Is it going to be able to do tricks?”

Tony looks up at Peggy with a look that says,  _ what, are you kidding me? _ “Of  _ course _ it’ll do tricks,” Tony says. “That’s easy, it’s just a little bit of coding. I bet— I bet I can make him bark, too, like a real dog, like  _ ruff!”  _ Tony giggles, and Peggy finds herself chortling along. “I just gotta tape a real dog barking and then I can put it on a little— thingy inside the dog. Like a cassette tape.”

“That sounds very impressive, Anthony,” she says. Truly. “Your father must be awfully proud of you.”

Tony looks down at his feet, scuffing the toe of his shoe along the ground as he walks. “Um, not really,” he mumbles. 

She pulls him to a stop. 

Crouches in front of him. 

“Anthony,” she says quietly.  _ “I _ am proud of you. Your mother is proud of you. Jarvis is very, very proud of you, always. He speaks of you like you’ve painted the night sky above him. Did you know that?”

Tony shrugs. 

“Darling,” she says, hushed, pained, like yanking her vocal chords fit to snap, “I know it must hurt you for your father to ignore you so. It’s okay that it hurts. He’s acting out of line.” Peggy feels her eyes burning and lets it happen. The poor lad needs someone to show him emotions are alright to have, to feel. “I just want to be absolutely sure you know how much we all love you,” her voice catches, “and that we think you are simply fantastic. Do you understand?”

Tony prods at her cheek, and she knows his fingers come away wet. His little hands rest on her, one on each cheekbone, thumbs wiping under her lashes. “I think so,” Tony says. “So, it’s okay for me show you my projects? Even if you’re busy?”

“Absolutely,” Peggy says.  _ “Absolutely. _ I always want to see them. And— and if I’m far away for work, call Uncle Daniel and I on the phone and tell us about it, like you just told me about Henry. Would that be okay with you?”

Tony nods, then leans forward and presses a quick kiss to her cheek. 

Peggy’s eyes fall close and she laughs wetly. “You’re alright, then, Anthony?”

“Yes,” he says. “Are you alright too?”

She loops an arm around him tight, pulling him against her chest, pressing a firm kiss into the side of his neck. “Absolutely, my love,” she says. “You’re here, after all.”

—

They get a move on, after that. 

It takes nearly an hour for them to find anything of note. It’s small and catches the light from her torch, sending a beam of gold like lightning fierce onto the wall opposite. She has Tony wait a few feet back in case it’s explosive. 

It isn’t. It’s a wedding band. 

Odds are, what with the angle from the grate nearest above them and all, it had fallen from the street above. She pockets it anyway, just in case. 

They set back on. 

“Thanks for letting me work with you, Aunt Peg,” Tony whispers out of nowhere, not even a whole minute after they find the ring. 

Peggy reaches down and grabs his little hand in hers, squeezing it. “Of course, darling. We’re having a bit of fun, aren’t we?”

“I like talkin’ with you,” Tony says, “so, yeah!”

Peggy grins down at him. He grins back up. 

They make it to a rather nasty bit of pathway, slick and slimy and smelling strongly of excrement and wet rock. 

“Eurgh,” Tony says. “Smells like sulfur.”

Peggy is about to ask how he knows the smell of sulfur before realizing, of course he knows the smell of sulfur. He knows damn near everything. 

The ground begins to rumble, then, ripples going through the water at their feet. 

“Shite,” Peggy says. Then, “don’t repeat that.”

Tony says, “shite.”

“That was probably another explosion,” she tells him. 

“So they’re doing lots?” Tony says. “All over the place, so it’s harder to find the man doin’ them?”

Peggy blinks. “Yes, that’s— that’s exactly what he’s doing. Good boy, Anthony.”

Tony seems to glow, bringing his dimpled hands close to his chest and grinning wide and unburdened up at her. “Thank you,” he says. “D’you think maybe the, um, the ‘splosions are all leading up to one big one, later? Like fireworks on the fourth of July, how they start with a couple and then there’s the big, the big finale?”

“You know,” she says, marveling, “I do believe you’re right, my love.”

Tony hops in place, his shoes splashing in the dampness. 

“Shall we keep looking, darling?” she says. 

Tony nods, pointing his torch forward and marching on. 

They soon come into an open area, a room of sorts, spacious enough to fit a one-story home. Their footsteps echo, their breathing amplified, almost church-like. 

She points her torch. Immediately it glints off of something, and she goes straight towards it. 

“Ah-hah,” Peggy says. She picks up a bullet casing. A Makarov. Russian, then, most definitely. A close-fire weapon. It’s grown cold, so she assumes it has lain here for a while. “This is called evidence, Anthony,” she says. “Evidence is something that helps you solve a mystery. Usually, like now,” she says, holding up the bullet casing. Tony squints to see it. “Like now, the evidence is left behind by the person who committed the crime. Since the man we are looking for is Russian, and this bullet casing comes from a Russian gun, the evidence makes us believe it once belonged to the man we are looking for.”

“What does this evidence mean?” says Tony, pointing. She angles her torch towards it. 

“Bloody hell,” she says. She fumbles with the backpack strap around her waist, unclips it, pulls off the pack, pulls out her pager. Sends out a distress call. “Bloody, bloody stinkin’ hell.”

“Oh,” says Tony, as if he understands. 

Peggy approaches the bomb slowly. It looks— well, it’s not benign, to say the least. With her steadiest fingers, Peggy flicks the cover flap of the bomb open. There’s a countdown flashing in red numbers like something out of a comic book. The face of an alarm clock, perhaps. 

It seems to be made on some sort of circuit, allowing the countdown as well as what she assumes is remote detonation, and is packed with classic, old fashioned smokeless powder and full of nails for good measure. 

The countdown reads three minutes and the time is dwindling quickly. 

“Ah,” she says. “I do not happen to know how to… do this.”

“What do you gotta do?” says Tony, peering over her shoulder from a distance, as if he is accustomed to leaving space between him and others. 

“This,” she says. She clears her throat. “This is an explosive, Anthony. I’ve called some people who can help turn it off for me, because I don’t trust doing it by myself.” 

Tony leans the slightest bit closer. “You’ve gotta turn it off?” he says. 

There are two and a half minutes until her and Tony are nothing more than ash and paint on these walls. Every flash of the numbers hits her in the gut like a well-placed punch, like a shallow knife. She wants to apologize for taking Jarvis’s son from him. She wants to apologize for not knowing better. Not being able to fix this— thing, this thing that she should know how to do absolutely. But she was never meant to detonate bombs. She was never meant to bring a child into the line of action, but she’s reckless, she always has been, God, she knows it. 

“Yes,” she tells Tony, trying to force the despair from her voice. Two minutes. Strike team on the way. They could be anywhere under the entire city. “Except it has no— no power button, not like a light, or a toy. It must be taken apart—“

“It needs to be disarmed,” Tony says. 

She stares. “Anthony, my love,” she says quietly. Her next breath heaves, stutters on the way in. Tastes like mold in the back of her mouth, ought they be cracking the concrete, burying themselves? A grave, a place to die. They’re already under the earth. “Do you know how to disarm something like this?”

He finally comes up just beside her. Stops. Looks at the explosive contemplatively. 

“This is  _ just _ like the circuit board I watched father make,” Tony says. “S’is easy. He taught me how to undo one of these when I was only  _ four _ .” 

And suddenly Peggy is watching a five year old disarm a bomb before her very eyes. 

Tony traces his tiny, toddler fingers over the wires, finds where they are plugged into the energy source. Pulls them out, one by one, never faltering, as Peggy’s heart bounds and her hands tremble and beads of sweat begin to trickle down the back of her neck. A child. One minute. Tony, with a bomb in his fat little fingers, with his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, missing two baby teeth and wearing mismatched socks, smeared on the wall, Jarvis and her with no body to bury. 

Like nothing at all, the countdown disappears. 

“Did it,” Tony says. 

It is then that a group of agents comes careening around the corner, guns at the ready. “Agent Carter,” Agent Twenty-Two calls. Peggy can see her sleeves swinging from here, her long blond hair pulled up and out of her face. “Have you found another explosive?”

Tony jumps up, holding the disarmed bomb above his head. “She fixed it!”

“Actually,” Peggy says, feeling her eye twitch, her knees threaten to give out, “Anthony here was able to disarm the bomb when I could not.”

“Oh, my god,” says the intern, who is dwarfed under the weight of three backpacks and truly wearing fiery red galoshes on her feet. 

Peggy scoops Tony into her arms, resting his weight against her hip. She swallows compulsively around a lump in her throat, tries to melt it like a mouthful of ice in the summer. “He’s Stark’s son,” Peggy says. 

“Still,” says the intern. She comes closer, just a few steps, as if nervous. “He was able to detonate a bomb combining both electrical and homemade, rudimentary explosive features without triggering a reaction within the other as he did so. He didn’t— he didn’t even have tools, a wire cutter. The statistical probability of doing that without causing a major exothermic reaction and resultant explosion are negligibly small.” 

Peggy blinks. 

“I’m— sorry, what’s your name, darling?” Peggy asks her. “And why are you carrying so many packs? It seems those two have empty shoulders.” She points at two male agents. 

She steps closer, closes the distance between herself and the group. With her one free hand, she helps the girl take off one bag at a time, and tosses each one strongly into the chests of the men. The glare she sends at each of them in turn seems to slice them into ribbons, and she watches their egos fall limp and feather-like to the ground. 

Only then does she turn back to the intern, who is seemingly stunned into silence. “You are no one’s pack-mule,” Peggy says. “If I did all the shite I was told to do by— lazy, privileged men, while I worked at the SSR, I never would have gotten to where I am today.” She breathes deeply. Tony fiddles idly with the ends of her hair. “They need you. You don’t need them. Come find me in the office later this week; I have a feeling I can scrounge up a much more useful position for you than grunt work.” 

The girl mashes her lips together, breathes, nods. “Thank you, Director Carter.” She brushes her hair behind her ears. “And it’s— it’s Mona. My name.”

“Mona,” Peggy repeats. “Yes, Mona, meet me in my office. I’ll make sure you’re let straight in.”

“I like your boots,” Tony chirps, pointing to Mona’s galoshes. “That’s my favorite color.”

“Red?” Mona says. She smiles wide. She’s so young. “Mine, too.”

Peggy looks between them. “Mine as well,” she says. 

She thinks of fresh blood on dirty snow, of a dress and a twirl and a rousing show. Of red numbers ticking lower. Of an aging actress and a girl who was more of a knife. 

She thinks of donning her lipstick like armor. Of Daniel dropping a rose onto her paperwork on his way out of the office when she works late. Of the leather chair at a desk that says her name, that says Director. Of cutting apples into slices for her children, of crayon wrappers littering the floor, of a boy who was red, red, red, from his brutal stare to his swollen lips to his cracked fists. 

“Mine as well,” she repeats. 

— 

Tony, Peggy, and Jarvis end up sat in a diner, slurping up milkshakes and watching the sun go down through the tall glass windows. Tony swings his feet under the table and picks at a plate of salty french fries, regaling Jarvis with a step-by-step of how he disarmed the bomb. Jarvis looks sick to his stomach. Peggy stirs her shake with her straw, rolling the strawberry mush around her mouth before swallowing. 

The rest of the agents that were on site are still galumphing through the sewers. Peggy had felt rather resoundingly that her and Tony were in need of a break for the night. When they met Jarvis back at the Bug, he had vehemently agreed.  _ I’m thinking Anthony deserves a bit of a treat for his hard work,  _ Peggy had said. And thus. A little family tea time, minus the tea. Rather fitting for them, a cap to a day of wild nerves and loud noise. A moment in a liminal space like this one to get lost within hours, between them. 

Jarvis’s pager beeps shrilly, wrenching Peggy clumsily back into the present. He pats his pockets to find it, murmuring, “I do believe that will be Mister Stark.”

“Mm,” Peggy says. She looks from Jarvis down to Tony. She leans forward, elbows on the table, so her forehead and Tony’s nearly bump. “Are you ready to go back home?” she asks him.

Tony shrugs. When he blinks, the right eye closes more fully. She had never noticed before. 

“Darling,” she says, “if you ever want to come visit Uncle Daniel and I, do tell Mister Jarvis. He’ll bring you.” Peggy looks up at Jarvis then, catching his eye as he finally frees the pager from the inner pocket of his jacket. “Mister and Missus Jarvis are always welcome round my house, as are you,” she says, looking back to Tony, “whether I’ve invited you or not. Alright?”

“Alright,” Tony says with a buoyant nod. He grabs a fry from his plate and holds it up near Peggy’s mouth. She takes it between her teeth, chuckling through her nose. 

“‘Fanks,” she offers around the fry. 

Tony’s smile is blinding. His laugh is like sweet music. 

“And if I ever need you to save me in a pinch again…” Peggy says. She winks at him. “I’ll call you.”

“Like Batman,” Tony says sagely.

“Even cooler,” says Peggy, “because you’re a _ real _ hero, my love.”

Tony simply grins, munching on his fries. 

Peggy and Jarvis meet eyes once more, feeling selfishly grateful that the world had landed them with such a child to care for. A special one, they both know; a star unmuffled, bright and loud and volatile, stronger than gravity’s pull, more clever than the moon, he winks, he watches, he flies; he’ll surely be doing great things, and they are lucky to be able to see it up close, to lean back in the silver light he gives and feel as if they were, at one point, a part of something of myths and legends.

**Author's Note:**

> i had this idea a few days ago and wrote the entire thing at work today surprise! i got a second wind after i put up that iron dad one a few days ago! was that yesterday? genuinely no clue time is fake so fake
> 
> i adore peggy in agent carter, and especially jarvis and peggy's weird friendship dynamic. their british wit is unmatchable. i hope this did them a wee bit of justice.
> 
> let me know if you enjoyed this, or what you'd want to see next! or if you hated it! your opinion is valid! basically just talk to me because it alleviates my depression! really i want to be best friends w you all. ALL. 
> 
> i love u more than tony loves john travolta <3


End file.
